Ow

Male masochism has been understood primarily in one of two ways by psychoanalytic writers since Freud, Suzanne Stewart (now Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg) argues in "Sublime Surrender: Male Masochism at the Fin-de-Siècle." The first alternative holds that male masochism originates in disavowed homosexuality. In this model the Cruel Woman at whose hands the submissive man experiences a gratifying suspension of gratification is a "phallic substitute"--ultimately, a stand-in for the masochist's father. The other traditional interpretation of the masochistic sexual dynamic was initiated by Gilles Deleuze's 1969 essay "Coldness and Cruelty." Deleuze argued that the figure of the Cruel Woman represents not a phallic substitute per se but rather a means for the masochist of undoing the phallus entirely and evading Oedipus. He claimed that the contract with the Cruel Woman constitutes an alliance, a sort of conspiracy, between the masochist and the cruel "oral mother"--the imago of the bad mother from before the phallic stage, thus before the Oedipus complex proper--to erase the father and construct a "new man" from scratch, without reference to the demands of the social order.

Here's how it works: the contract between the submissive male and the Cruel Woman initiates a peculiarly aesthetic sexuality whose chief characteristic is a complex structure of disavowal. That which is disavowed: 1) the mother's lack (hence the regular old fetishism incorporated into the masochistic aesthetic; it's through participating in this fetishism that the Cruel Woman becomes the "phallic mother," i.e. uncastrated woman); 2) genitality (i.e. the genitals as dominant source of gratification; hence the theatrical suspension of gratification, a masquerade of displeasure in the ego put on for the superego's benefit; this suspension itself becomes a prime source of gratification); 3) the paternal symbolic (now that both the phallus and the penis have been deflated, as it were, the father's prohibition loses all authority, specifically the authority to constitute the subject as a normal heterosexual male within the symbolic order of social relations; thus the father is "banished," both the threat that underwrites Oedipus and Oedipus itself are averted, and an incestuous relationship between the pre-Oedipal boy and the maternal imago is able to pertain happily, so to speak, ever after, with a perpetual cycle of masqueraded guilt and punishment as the sole cost to the subject).

Within the Deleuzian "masochistic universe," the subject's superego has been introjected on the model of this cruel, always-punishing mother, rather than on the model of the prohibiting father that most of us guys get stuck with. On the other hand, maybe ours is more like theirs than we realize. Slavoj Žižek has famously argued that contemporary capitalist culture is governed by the law of just such a maternal superego, whose dictum is not "No!" (Lacan's "le non-du-père") but "Enjoy yourself!" That is, the typical subject of Western society today is, for Žižek, a pathological narcissist whose superego "does not prohibit enjoyment but, on the contrary, imposes it and punishes 'social failure' in a far more cruel and severe way, through an unbearable and self-destructive anxiety" (215).

The central argument of Stewart's densely theoretical book is that the male masochistic subjectivity, which in the prevailing Deleuzian model has usually been read as valuably subversive of patriarchal power relations, rather should be thought of as a means by which men, starting in the late nineteenth century, usurped women's place as the rightful source of the critique of patriarchy. Thus women, who had been materially oppressed in countless ways by the patriarchal symbolic, were ostentatiously upstaged by men who redefined their own subjectivity in fundamentally masochistic terms. This is the second masquerade of masochism, put on for the benifit not of the masochist's own superego but of real women. Thus men positon themselves as the primary agents in a "feminism without women," that is, a critique of patriarchy in which the true victims of patriarchy are once again disempowered, this time by being excluded from the dismantling of the patriarchal symbolic itself. Stewart approvingly summarizes Tania Modleski's similar argument about the even more recent figure of the "sensitive guy": "Men's newly acquired sensitivity to women's marginality is predicated upon men usurping that marginality for themselves and thereby writing women completely out of the picture" (196).

This argument relies on something like Wendy Brown's revision of Nietzche's notion of "ressentiment," though Stewart doesn't use this word. (Neither does she mention Brown, and the only mention of Nietzsche to be found in her text refers to his musical taste.) Brown's politics of ressentiment is founded on the claim that "because power corrupts truth and compromises moral authority, those without power are especially qualified to speak" (Nancy Armstrong's summary of Brown in "How Novels Think" p. 141). For the first time in the history of Western culture, masochistic subjectivity pushes women into the central position and forces the male subject to assume the marginal position--just at the moment when that same culture is beginning to recognize that the marginal position is in fact the truly central one. (Though she never once mentions Hegel's name, Stewart may be acknowledging the Hegelianism of this idea by citing another critic's witty phrase "the dialectic of mistress and slave" on p. 121.) Perhaps none of this might matter politically if it what we ended up with after destroying the traditional patriarchal symbolic had turned out to be an egalitarian utopia, but of course this has not turned out to be the case.

As I understand it, although this is seldom if ever articulated, there are two fundamentally distinct forms of sexual experience that tend to get conflated in discussions of masochism. They should perhaps be called "punishment-masochism" and "pain-masochism." The first is the dynamic that has been discussed above, of which Sacher-Masoch is the prototype. In the other, the Other doesn't matter, because here masochism is not a sexual dynamic at all, but rather a means through which to experience extreme bodily intensities, what Foucault called "limit experiences." In this notion of masochism, the nature of the "tormentor" is a matter of complete indifference--it might as well be a machine--because all that matters is the pain itself, not as an encounter with another but as a mute means to trigger a pleasurable failure of stable psychological structures. This self-shattering, or ébranlement, is ultimately constitutive of and accessible through not just specifically masochistic sexual practices but all sexuality, as Leo Bersani has persuasively argued. I wrote my Master's (no pun intended) thesis on Bersani's philosophy and its relation to cinema--but that's a story for another time.